05-06-11
BioCellar Event Videos
If you missed the BioCellar event at the CUDC on April 26th, now you can watch the presentations online:
BioCellar Presentations - 1 of 3 - Intro
BioCellar Presentations - 2 of 3 - Darrell Frey | Bioshelter Market Garden @ Three Sisters Farm
BioCellar Presentations - 3 of 3 - Gauri Torgalkar | BioCellar: Concept to Prototype
05-03-11
RFP for Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone
Re-imagining a [Greater] Cleveland is seeking proposals to develop a plan for the Kingsbury Run Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone.
The Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone is a defined district (in the area of East 79th Street and Kinsman Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio) that will foster entrepreneurial farming activities and related businesses. The plan will provide a comprehensive design approach for a Live | Play | Grow neighborhood that integrates agriculture into the surrounding neighborhood.
04-07-11
BioCellar Event 4/26 @ CUDC
Click here to download BioCellar invite pdf
05-12-10
Detroit Disassembled at Akron Art Museum
From Akron Art Museum website:
Andrew Moore’s photographs of the Motor City are sublime—beautiful, operatic in scale and drama, tragic yet offering a glimmer of hope. They are the subject of Detroit Disassembled, an exhibition organized by the Akron Art Museum making its debut here before touring nationally. Detroit, once the epitome of our nation’s industrial wealth and might, has been in decline for almost a half-century. The city is now one-third empty land—more abandoned property than any American city except post-Katrina New Orleans.
Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore
June 5, 2010 - October 10, 2010
Arnstein, Bidwell and Isroff Galleries
Akron Art Museum
One South High Akron, OH 44308
(330) 376-9185
Detroit Disassembled exhibit website
by david jurca
03-22-10
Manchester DJ Dave Haslam Talk
This is a short notice event announcement, but we’d like to invite everyone to stop by the CUDC for an exciting presentation on Saturday, March 27th starting at 5:30pm. A friend of ours, the multi-talented Dave Haslam, will be visiting from Manchester, UK next weekend for a DJ-ing gig at B-Side Liquor Lounge on Sunday and we want to take the opportunity to spotlight some of his other interests with a talk the night before.
Dave will deliver a talk on the post-punk band Joy Division’s emergence in the context of post-industrial Manchester in the late 70’s, the band’s re-emergence as New Order after singer Ian Curtis’ tragic death and their music’s enduring influence to this day.
If you’re a fan of Joy Divison, New Order or the bands they inspired (U2, the Killers, Arcade Fire, etc.), then this is definitely an event you won’t want to miss. But the story of creativity in the midst of affliction is something in which we can all find inspiration.
by david jurca
12-20-09
Public Square Concepts Go Public
Thread scheme : Exiting Terminal Tower / Field Operations
This past week, a steering committee comprised of members from Downtown Cleveland Alliance (DCA) and ParkWorks reviewed initial concepts for a redesign of Cleveland’s Public Square. Our CUDC office was on the design team, which was lead by James Corner’s Field Operations (FO). Our joint team was selected by the steering committee through an RFQ process back in October. The short time frame between team selection in October and initial concepts due on December 16th meant that we all had to work quickly to gather information on existing conditions, review studies already undertaken on future uses of Public Square and prepare images of alternative schemes for the steering committee to weigh in on.
The CUDC supported FO’s lead design work by assembling data and mapping of current conditions and providing “on-the-ground” information to FO regarding cultural and social context. In the process, we also created a time-lapse video of Public Square, which provides a clear visual of the constant shade condition on the southwest quadrant, closest to the Tower City entrance. Collaborating on a project with an office located in another city was a valuable experience and we’re very excited about the concepts developed.
10-19-09
Resilient Cities Lecture
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Explorer Lecture Series will bring Dr. Timothy Beatley, professor of urban and environmental planning, for a lecture on Green Urbanism: The Global Shift Towards Sustainable and Resilient Cities. Dr. Beatley of the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia has authored several books including Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities and Resilient Cities: Responding to Peak Oil and Climate Change.
In Resilient Cities, Beatley presents four scenarios for the future of cities: Collapse, Ruralized, Divided or Resilient Cities. The first describes the nightmare scenario of writers such as James Howard Kunstler, which warn that skyrocketing oil prices and climate change will initiate a chain of events resulting in significant loss to human life, global economic failure and an end to civilization as we know it. Beatley doesn’t believe that Collapse is inevitable, but does warn against other, slightly less apocalyptic scenarios. Read more…
10-16-09
House, Turned Inside Out Opening
Closing December 11, 2009
Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative/Pop Up City hosts Martin Papcun (Prague, Czech Republic) as he presents his newest large-scale, site-specific installation at 3601 Siam Road in Ohio City.
The artist, along with construction partners American Tank Fabricating and Affordable Demolition & Hauling Inc., will slice into the walls of a house and turn them inside out to reveal the interior of the home. The installation, House, turned inside out, a massive, yet intricate deconstruction, will be open to the public for one month.
The project is funded by a grant from CEC ArtsLink New York. For more information, email: info@popupcity.com
09-10-09
VOTE: Bridge Design[Build] Charrette
What if the Detroit-Superior Bridge lower level became a public space? How would you use it? Now is your chance to see it happen.
1. Visit www.BridgeProjectVote.com to share your thoughts on initial concepts developed by students involved in the Bridge Project design[build] charrette. Leave your comments on the projects and begin a dialogue with the students. What ideas do you like? What would you like to see more details on? What new uses would you like to see included?
2. Share the link with co-workers, friends, family and smarter-than-average pets. The students would love to have your feedback so they can quickly develop and refine their projects. Only a few projects will be selected to be built full-scale on the bridge, so make your thoughts known!
3. Come to the public opening during the Bridge Project on Friday and Saturday September 25th (4pm-midnight) and 26th (noon-midnight) to experience the selected projects as built prototypes. Public input on the projects will continue during the two day bridge opening as people activate the spaces and students observe the interactions, then adjust the installations.
Oftentimes as designers the distance between conceptual plan and embodied user experience is too wide to be meaningful. The rapid prototyping concept for the Bridge Project charrette intends to collapse this distance and introduce user feedback earlier in the design process. The installations during the event should not be viewed as finished products, but rather as prototypes designed to engage and draw feedback from the future users of the space.
Many thanks to Jeff Schuler for constructing the drupal website for project voting: www.jeffschuler.net
by david jurca
09-09-09
All You Can Eat: A Buffet of Architectural Ideas for Cleveland
Kent architecture alums Tedd Ferringer, Jeremy Smith and Michael Abrahamson are hosting the event, “All You Can Eat: A Buffet of Architectural Ideas for Cleveland.”
Here’s their write-up of the event, which will be happening in University Circle on Oct. 30-31:
What is a city’s recommended daily intake of architecture? Let’s exceed it…
All You Can Eat: A Buffet of Architectural Ideas for Cleveland, an upcoming exhibition to be held at The Sculpture Center, posits that the city has a high metabolic rate, burning through ideas faster than they can be ingested. In response, the exhibit will present a binge of possible futures excessive in scale and exhaustive in scope, ideas both raw and cooked, half-baked and hair-brained.
Join us in preparing a feast.
For more information on this event, including how to submit an entry (you don’t need to be an architect/designer, although you certainly can be), click here.
06-15-09
The Bridge Project Charrette
For more info on the Bridge Project event, please visit: www.clevelandbridgeproject.com
Every year, graduate students at the CUDC take part in a community design charrette, which addresses the urban design needs of a particular site or neighborhood in Northeast Ohio. This year’s charrette will be part of the Bridge Project scheduled for September 25th and 26th.
During a typical charrette, students are asked to gather relevant data about the focus area in preparation for a community meeting where stakeholders and residents share their thoughts and desires for the neighborhood. The students then work along side CUDC staff to quickly develop design solutions and assemble presentations for the community. In years past, the student charrettes have focused on downtown Lakewood, the Jewish Community Federation site, the Howard Street corridor in Akron and Youngstown’s Oak Hill neighborhood.
06-08-09
Urban Exploration
Kent architecture alum, Ted Ferringer M.Arch ‘08, MUD ‘08, took these photos while exploring the urban outskirts of Cleveland. His descriptions of place are coupled with the photography.
“Admiring”
This photo is from the roof of the old Howard Johnson’s hotel at the north end of E. 55th Street, just off of I90. This photo was taken during the Labor Day weekend airshow, which some friends and I spent the afternoon watching from the roof. That roof probably has the best view in the city.
A common collaborator of mine and good friend, Ryan DeBiase, embellished the day’s events in a blog post, here. It’s a work of creative non-fiction; some events are true, some are complete lies. Granted, he still re-caped the day’s events better then I ever could.
Its pretty ironic that the demo of the building started, then stopped, and now looks like it was bombed. It seems somehow appropriate, however, that the lies of that day eventually became a sort of fact.
6611 Euclid Ave. (1) and (2)
These photos were taken during another urban exploration with my common companion for such things, Mr. DeBiase. This building intrigued us the second we saw it after moving to Cleveland. It’s located along the Euclid Corridor, and its basic story is that it used to be light industrial/warehouse space (I believe it housed a garment factory for a number of years) before eventually being abandoned.
When the Euclid Corridor project started, the front bay of the building on the Euclid Ave. side was cut off to accommodate the wider street. For quite a while the building sat unsecured, with the entire front of the building sitting open–creating an amazing real-life building section.
Again, there seems to something inherently poetic about having to cut into the former soul of the city (a former manufacturing building)–creating a monumental scar–for progress to take place.
The RTA, which owns the building, has since covered the front of the building with giant metal panels, creating a new billboard/super graphic along the corridor, promising better times ahead. Like all things Cleveland, the potential is amazing, if perhaps forever unrealized.
I also happened to do a real estate case study for this property in a real estate class at CSU’s Levin College. This property would make an amazing technology/health care incubator site, as the shell of the building is in amazing shape, in an amazing location. It could make an incredible mixed use, TOD development.
Photos from this day’s real were just used in an article about this idea.
(Ted Ferringer lives in Ohio City and works for a local architecture firm.)
* If you have photography of Cleveland (especially about topics of urban development) that you would like to see on this blog, feel free to leave a comment with your email address, and we’ll get back to you.
by marianne eppig
05-21-09
Map of Cleveland’s Green Systems
This is a map of Cleveland showing vacant sites (in red), existing parks (in dark green), and proposed parkland and greenspaces (in light green). The map was drawn by the Urban Design Center for Cleveland LandLab.
posted by marianne eppig.
05-20-09
Pop Up City Book Trailer
It might not have the quick edits and intense action sequences of typical movie trailers, but we think our star moved pretty fast, for a panda.
Urban-Infill Volume 2: Pop Up City can be ordered from Amazon or from the Shrinking Cities Institute website.
Support for the Pop Up City initiative is provided by the Civic Innovation Lab and the Sears-Swetland Foundation. The publication of the Pop Up City book was made possible by funding from the George Gund Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
by david jurca
05-13-09
Terry Schwarz Receives Cleveland Arts Prize
Congratulations to our very own Terry Schwarz for being awarded the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize! Terry is senior planner at the CUDC and an adjunct professor at Kent State University.
Terry was awarded the artist prize in design for her work surrounding the Shrinking Cities Institute at the CUDC, which addresses local population decline. The multifaceted work of the Shrinking Cities Institute includes the Cleveland Land Lab, the Pop Up City! temporary use intiative and two editions of the Urban-Infill Journal.
The awards ceremony will be held Thursday, June 25th at the Hanna Theatre in Playhouse Square. Tickets are available by calling 216 321-0012 or by email at info@clevelandartsprize.org.
by david jurca